2013: A Manhattan City Council candidate promotes his campaign via cookie, collabing with two Chinese restaurants in his district. 2018: A photo of a fortune cookie ad from Capital One (and OpenFortune) gets 1.7K RTs. Caption: “Ad blockers ain’t got nothing on the nyc take out market.” 2021: Extra and OpenFortune run the first fortune cookie ad we’ve seen with a QR code. a long-standing channel that still gets social traction for existing. According to OpenFortune, 5.9% of recipients share their fortunes on social. Those shares can veer negative, though. “NOTHING IS BEAUTIFUL NOR INNOCENT ANYMORE,” one recipient tweeted about promotional fortune.
This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Finland Phone Number List Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here. Despite iOS changes disrupting… everything this year, Snap brought in $1B+ in revenue in Q3 2021 — a first! James Borow helped the social platform get there. He joined Snap in 2016 to lead development of Snapchat’s self-service ad products, including an ads API. Back then, Snapchat sold ads through a sales team — but today, they sell ads via digital auction, a transition that has nearly 8Xed quarterly revenue since Q3 2016. So why doesn’t every app build its own self-serve ad platform? Well, it involves a lot of “thrash,” Borow said — and it’s not for everyone.
CON: You need tons of users to even start. Otherwise, “you're not going to be able to find pockets of users that are likely to install an application versus ones that are likely... to buy a shoe,” Borow said. Snapchat had 122M daily active users when Borow joined to lead ad product development — and now it’s at 306M. CON: Your sales team can’t do manual favors for top advertisers anymore. To optimize ad pricing and targeting, self-serve adtech needs to process every transaction on your platform, and your salespeople need to pivot into consultative roles. “You need to commit to saying, ‘I'm going to build an economically rational marketplace,’” Borow said — like the stock market.